Decoupling analysis of the carbon emissions’ change and the economic growth in Jiangxi’s agricultural sector

¹ School of Geography and Environment, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330022, China
² Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Wetland and Watershed Research, Ministry of Education, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330022, China

^* Corresponding author: lcy200505@163.com

Abstract

Taking Jiangxi’s agricultural sector as an example, we first computed the carbon emissions of Jiangxi’s agricultural sector during 2005-2018 in this paper, and then used the Tapio decoupling model to explore the decoupling status between the carbon emissions’ change and the economic growth. The results showed that: the carbon emissions of Jiangxi’s agriculture, first, increased from 236.98×10⁴ t in 2005 to 274.00×10⁴ t in 2015, and then decreased from 270.74×10⁴ t in 2016 to 247.95×10⁴ t in 2018. The decoupling relationship between the carbon emissions’ change and the economic growth mainly expressed as weak decoupling during 2005-2015 and strong decoupling during 2015-2018. The reason was that Jiangxi’s economy is no longer developing in an extensive way, but is shifting to a low-carbon development pattern. Namely, the carbon emissions from chemical fertilizer and pesticide were the most important part of agricultural carbon emissions. Moreover, this part’s emissions showed a significant downward trend along with the update of agriculture technology and the improvement of production efficiency. Thus, some particular suggestions to reduce the agricultural carbon emissions of Jiangxi were put forward.